Conventions used on this site.

Bibliographies

My short bibliographies will follow this simple format:

Author (Birth/Death). Work (Year).

My larger bibliographies will roughly follow the bibliography style of the MLA [ref at UIUC.edu]. If a work has multiple creators, then the creators follow the title of the work.

Author. "Title of a part of the book". Title of the book. Editor, translator, or compiler. Number of the edition used. Number(s) of the volume(s) used. Name of the series. Page numbers. Place of publication: name of publisher, date of publication. ISBN. Other bibliographic information and annotation, like date of first publication.

EG: Hernandez, George. The Great American Novel. Chicago, IL: Acme Publishers, 2005. p. 230. ISBN: 1234567890.

While the convention of "last name, first name" is good for several reasons (EGs: Sorting lists. Asian names.), it is also bad for several reasons (EGs: People don't computer search that way. It uses an extra character. Some folks don't have two names. I've flip-flopped on this several times but as of 2007-07-14, I'm opting for "Last, First" because of the many Asian names I reference.

Author. "Article Title". Journal Title Volume Number (Date): page numbers.

Author. "Article Title". Magazine Title Date: page numbers.

Movie or TV show. Directed by director. Screenplay by author. Based upon a book by author. Distributor, year of release. Characters and actors.

"Title of episode".  TV show. City: Network, affiliate, broadcast date. Speaker, character, actor, etc.

Play or show. Directed by director. Written by author. City: Theater, date. Characters and actors.

Dates

Since 2003-06-10, I have adopted using the ISO 8601 convention for date formatting. While it would be nice to change all the dates on this site over to ISO 8601 formatting, I will only put a minor effort into doing so because I have other things to do.

You may also notice timestamps on the bottom left of most of my pages. They both indicate when the file was last modified. The first is a manual entry, while the latter is automatically pulled as a property of the file. The latter is usually sufficient, but I will occassionally use the former to denote things like major changes.

Most pages on my site used to have keyboard shortcuts that make a pop-up window with the current date & time stamp in both ISO 8601 format (ALT+I. EG: 2005-01-26t16:11:15Z) and RFC 822 format (ALT+R. EG: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 16:11:15 GMT). For kicks, here are bookmarklet versions: ISO 8601 Z and ISO 8601 Local.

Here's a short list of some annual dates I honor:

See also my section on Time.

Editorial Comments

Most editorial comments are usually of a different color, with or without square brackets, indented or not. (Of course in code I will use the commenting markers appropriate for the language.) EG:

[This is a typical editorial comment.]

Expanding Icons

On some of the pages, I let you decide whether you want to experience a piece of media. That way you can decide if you want to wait for the download.

EG: If you click on the thumbnail below, it will load a picture of Fred Rogers. I use this when it is useful for you to preview the image.

thumbnail picture of Fred Rogers

EG: If you click on the icon below, it will load a picture of the letter A. I use this when the images on a page are similar and a thumbnail would not be useful.

Click on me to see the letter A

EG: If you click on the icon below, most browsers will play an audio file: "You were serious about that?" from the movie My Cousin Vinny.

Click on me to hear Joe Pesci

Example Code

Sample code is displayed using a mono-spaced font, sometimes with a different background color. EG:

If intAge = 2 Then
    txtResponse = "Wah, wah, wah!"
End If

An element substituted by the programmer is in italics. EG:

If Condition Then
    Statement
End If

Programmer comments are in a different color. EG:

If Condition Then
    Statement     'This is just a comment.
End If

Optional items are usually enclosed in square brackets ([ ]). EG:

SELECT [ALL] SelectList
--The above could be:
--SELECT SelectList 
--SELECT ALL SelectList

Literal square brackets are displayed in bold ([ ]). EG:

Set objNodes = xmltree.selectNodes("//book[price < 15]")

When there are two or more options, they are usually separated by a pipe (|). EG:

SELECT [ALL | DISTINCT] SelectList
--The above could be: 
--SELECT SelectList 
--SELECT ALL SelectList 
--SELECT DISTINCT SelectList

When there are two or more options and a selection must be chosen then the choices are enclosed by curly brackets ({ }). EG:

FROM TableLeft [INNER | [{LEFT | RIGHT | FULL} OUTER] | CROSS] JOIN TableRight 
--The above could be: 
--FROM TableLeft JOIN TableRight 
--FROM TableLeft INNER JOIN TableRight 
--FROM TableLeft LEFT OUTER JOIN TableRight 
--FROM TableLeft RIGHT OUTER JOIN TableRight 
--FROM TableLeft FULL OUTER JOIN TableRight 
--FROM TableLeft CROSS JOIN TableRight

There will be exceptions to the above rules. EGs:

On this site code is displayed in the Courier New font. There are other very nice monospaced fonts but Courier New (or Courier) is more ubiquitous. Other fonts have their uses (EG: Arial Unicode MS can show almost any character in any language), but code should only need to show ASCII plus some ISO Latin 1 or Windows 1252. Use Courier (not Courier New) or fixedsys or the like if you want ASCII and have all ASCII as flagged.

Font grave lsquo rsquo apos ldquo rdquo quot lc o UC O zero one lc l UC I lc i vert bar
Courier New `‘’'“”" oO01lIi|
Consolas `‘’'“”" oO01lIi|
Andale Mono `‘’'“”" oO01lIi|
Arial `‘’'“”" oO01lIi|

Hyperlinks

Most hyperlinks on this site lead to elsewhere on this site. Otherwise I try to provide some sort of clue that the link will take you off-site. EGs:

I have visited every link that leads off this site. The majority of the links on this site are "lasting links" (links that we return to reliably and regularly). I will try to place any "liquid links" (links that flutter in and out of our lives) or "lingering links" (links that are worth parking for a while) in my blog sections. If you find any "dead links" (links that don't work), then please contact me.

My content (esp. my links) may have brackets next to it with notes about the link. EGs:

This site is sprinkled with in-house metadata. Just ignore it. This metadata will be manifested as a non-functional hyperlink with this syntax: [metadata[: Note]].

2004-09-02T16:14:48Z. I have started adopting a convention of sometimes displaying the actual URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of an external link as well as the "title" of the link. EG: Field Museum of Natural History [fmnh.org]. Here are several reasons for doing this:

If the original link is followed by links that belong to the same domain, then those links may be displayed as human readable instead of as an URL.

My Basic Filing System

[Don't bother reading this section --it's more for internal use.]

Each page will have a file name (EG: Default.asp), but each page may have an HTML title (EG: <title>Databases</title>) that may or may not differ from a title used in navigation bars (EG: DBs).

Physical Buttons

When I write about keyboard or mouse buttons that have to by physically pressed, I will try to put them in upper case and use the HTML tag of <kbd> with some CSS applied. For actions that have to be done simultaneously, I will use the + sign. EGs:

Pronunciation

Linguists often use International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to phonetically represent spoken languages. The standard is to place IPA pronunciations either in square brackets ("[" and "]") or slashes ("/") for narrow or broad transcriptions respectively. EG: The English word "pretzel" could be annotated as /prɛtsəl/. I'm not a linguist so my pronunciation transcriptions are rather crude and I will enclose them in back slashes ("\"). EG: Richard Stallman's GNU project is pronounced \guh-nooh\.

Ratings

Starting with 2005-11-02t18:14:45Z, I am tagging some of my content (especially posts and links) with more meta data, especially "ratings".

The first form of rating I implement is a "quality rating". There are many distinctions of quality. A show may have a production rating of Q3of9, but a liking rating of Q8of9.

The second form of rating is a "suitability rating". I'm not pro-censorship but there are several good reasons to "rate".

So here are my "age suitability ratings". For a specific age range I would have multiple tags (EG: A06; A14;).

Additional "suitability" metadata will be provided by additional tags such as the following.

Titles and Headings

Here is an explanation of some of the particular titles, headings, or sections used on this site.

You will probably notice an astounding lack of consistency in the capitalization I use in my titles and headings. I allow this because I find humor in the tension between traditional casing, maximizing information density, and the difficulty of rendering custom title cases programmatically. EGs:

The Tale of Tail of Tom: zMisc    Traditional title case
The tale of Tail of Tom: zMisc    Traditional sentence case
the tale of Tail of Tom: zMisc    Maximized info density
The Tale Of Tail Of Tom: Zmisc    Lazy programmatic title case
The Tale Of Tail of Tom: zMisc    A mix of the above

aaIntro

aaIntro introduces a topic.

aaScrap

aaScrap are areas where I will park notes for exploring, refining, and sorting later.

Here is how I usually head such a section:

Scrap notes on x that I am parking here for exploring, refining, and sorting later.

EG

EG provides an example for a particular topic. EG pages have names with this syntax: EG DescriptiveName. A sentence with an EG and a colon assumes that a sentence follow the EG. EG: EG: Hello world!. "eg" or "e.g." is common short hand for the Latin exempli gratia, which means "for example".

Miscellany

zMisc has miscellaneous content pertaining to a topic. Note that in general if a section has a zMisc as well as a zLinks and/or a zVoc, then I will to place the zMisc first; the logic is that the zLinks and/or zVoc pertains to all the sub-topics in the section, including the zMisc sub-topics.

zVoc

zVoc is a glossary pertaining to a topic. Here are conventions that I usually follow in zVoc.

zLinks

zLinks has links that lead to off-site pages about a particular topic.

For a given section, I will always try to put zLinks last. If a section has zOther categories (EG: zMisc and zVoc) as well as a zLinks, then I will to place the zLinks section last even though it is out of alphabetical order. The logic is that the zLinks pertains to all the sub-topics in the section, including the zMisc sub-topics. See also Hyperlinks.

Here is how I usually head such a section:

Links that lead to off-site pages about x.

Miscellany

Page Modified: (Hand noted: 2008-08-21 21:03:11Z) (Auto noted: 2011-09-01 19:25:26Z)